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They’re Mad, They’re Bad, They Sell Accent Pieces

Garry Jensen and Elena Bertinetto's loft has a revolving wall that changes colors.Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

IF the flame-colored lettering on the fire exit at the Manhattan apartment of Garry Jensen and Elena Bertinetto looks like graffiti, that is because it is: domesticated graffiti, if you will. Walking through Harlem, Mr. Jensen and Ms. Bertinetto spotted the artist at work and hired him on the spot.

That chandelier over the dining table? It came from a shop at the Marché aux Puces flea market, and it cost about $8,000. The dealer said two others like it were in a home once owned by Coco Chanel.

Starting to get the picture? This European husband and wife, who are as bad as two former investment bankers can be, have just started an online home décor shop, Deeply Madly Living, that cultivates an outlaw image with its design picks and slogan (“‘Cool’ living for the wild at heart”), but doesn’t shy away from $9,500 cabinets. Their newly decorated apartment in Manhattan’s garment district cost $2.1 million. That lithograph in the foyer is indeed a Picasso.

But you are perhaps distracted by the dark lettering beneath the flowered chiffon sleeve of Ms. Bertinetto’s blouse, which is, on closer inspection, a tattoo of her husband’s name. She is the daughter of an Italian diplomat, and you can image how her conservative parents must have felt about that.

Mr. Jensen, who is Danish, also has his partner’s name on his arm. Beside it is a rendering of a motorcycle engine, so meticulously done it could be an illustration in a mechanic’s handbook. His tattoos are covered by a long-sleeved purple dress shirt, but Mr. Jensen, who does most of the talking (and says he was so hard-charging when he was in finance that his nickname was the Rottweiler), is happy to roll up his sleeve and show them to you.

“Elena is essentially the motor of my life,” he says. “As an investment banker, I had the Elena tattoo, which was unheard-of. It raised a lot of eyebrows when we went out together in the summer.” The engine tattoo, he adds, was done after he left Lehman Brothers, for the second time, in February. He also bought himself a Harley-Davidson.

How much, by the way, was he making when he left Lehman? “The year I walked, two and a half million. But it wasn’t guaranteed. The base salary was two hundred thousand.”

Do not hate them because they are beautiful, rich and cultivated, and because the custom revolving home-theater thing that separates the living area from the dining room cost around $22,000.

Mr. Jensen, 46, wears a ring with his aristocratic German great-grandfather’s family crest, but he says that he never received a penny from his family, and that may be true. When he was 14, his father, an architect, announced that he was quitting the business and moving to the Canary Islands to build his own house on the beach and live.

Garry Jensen, left behind in Denmark to finish his education, worked as an apprentice at a Danish bank rather than finishing high school, then worked at J. P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers in London, Moscow and New York. His long hours, he says, cost him his first marriage. (He has 10-year-old twin sons who live with their mother in Rome.)

Ms. Bertinetto, who is 40 and wears knee-high python boots, got a bachelor’s degree in financial regulation and economic policies in Rome, but after that spent a few years traveling, restoring frescoes on ceilings and walls and painting murals in villas throughout Europe, and then worked in banking.

They met on a plane in 2000, where Ms. Bertinetto was reading Charles Bukowski, a really bad boy, and they married in 2004, in a four-day celebration in the Canary Islands. This month they started the Deeply Madly Living site, which sells accent pieces like a ceramic skull with a bullet hole in the temple. The name was inspired by Ms. Bertinetto’s declaration to her husband that she loved him deeply, madly and was thinking of getting another tattoo to that effect.

Photo

Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

O.K., go ahead, hate them.

THE couple bought their 2,400-square-foot apartment in 2005, the year that Mr. Jensen, who had briefly given up the investment business to live with his wife in the Canary Islands and enjoy life, rejoined Lehman Brothers.

A renovation for the apartment’s previous owners by the New York architectural firm of Workshop/apd was already under way, and Mr. Jensen and Ms. Bertinetto decided to retain the architects. One unusual and practical feature of the original design: what looks like a single wall between the master bedroom and the guest room is actually two back-to-back walls, one of which pulls away from the other on a track, creating a space between them so that two rooms can become three.

Mr. Jensen and Ms. Bertinetto also brought their own ideas to the design. A metal fire door in the master bedroom was replaced with a glass door that looks out on a lime-green balcony. A wall of the utility closet was pushed back to open up the entrance.

Ms. Bertinetto did some of the detail work in the apartment herself. A door in the entrance hall that appears to be made of stamped metal is actually wood covered in $6.99-a-foot silver contact paper.

In the living and dining areas, Ms. Bertinetto wanted open space that would have a degree of visual separation. Working with Shadi Shahrokhi, a New York designer and architect who runs SHAdi + Company, she and Mr. Jensen created a revolving unit that functions as a partition, with a painting on one side and a flat screen TV and music system with retractable speakers on the other.

The furnishings are modern pieces mixed with reimagined flea market finds. The dining room table, which at first glance appears to be mosaic tile inlaid in a classic white Parsons table, is in fact a mosaic church altar top, for which Mr. Jensen paid $500 at an Italian flea market 15 years ago, encased in a modern table of lacquered African wood.

Two contemporary leather sofas from Spain share space with a pair of Chesterfield chairs from a London flea market. Ms. Bertinetto dispatched the old-school mood of the chairs by having them reupholstered in purple velvet.

A pool table that Mr. Jensen rescued after it had been tossed out of a Canary Islands hotel has been painted in a graffiti style. The legs, as is only appropriate, have been painted in canary yellow enamel. Even the couple’s silverware and Ms. Bertinetto’s oversized aquamarine engagement ring stone were found in flea markets.

The most devoted flea market shopper, however, must at times buy retail. Deeply Madly Living (www.deeplymadlyliving.com) was prompted in part by Mr. Jensen’s annoyance at having to spend hours on the Web searching for what he considered cool coffee table and lamps.

And cool the site strives to be.

It opens with a fellow in a fedora dancing against a gritty urban backdrop. The products, which can also be viewed at the company’s garment district showroom include a $1,600 table lamp with a shade made of aviator sunglasses; a $940 chair made from bicycle parts and wheels; a $14,400 Swedish-made No Gravity Lounge Chair, which employs a material used by NASA that adapts to one’s body shape and temperature; and $160-per-pair Pop Art-like silkscreens that depict a young woman pulling out a tooth with pliers and eating a doughnut filled with razor blades. The artist, a young woman, had some eating disorder issues that stemmed from a broken heart, Ms. Bertinetto says. (“She never left her home — she ate, ate, ate. She found comfort in sugars and sweets and, of course, blew up. That’s why she depicts doughnuts with blades in them, ice creams with pills.”)

There is also a $4,900 coffee table emblazoned with the phrase “Live Hard” (perfect if you’re having bikers over for canapés), $150 ceramic pistol paperweights and a $350 decorative ceramic skull with a bullet hole in the temple, plated in platinum or gold. (“Sophisticated and edgy, this piece responds to the ultimate evolution in punk art, a movement initiated in the 1970s and questioning the values of bourgeois society,” the promotional copy reads. And if you yearn to be edgy, but aren’t quite sure where you’d put a skull with a bullet hole: “An ultimate provocation to the basic simplified values of society, where high-end materials are expected to go hand in hand with polished, sophisticated shapes.” Capisce? You just put the skull next to your Saporiti sofa.)

So what’s up with that stuff?

“Other than we have identified some provocative items that we consider cool and edgy and truly original as accent pieces that will help to reinvent someone’s home and turn it into something interesting for the mind and eye?” asks Mr. Jensen. A heck of a sound bite, establishing once again that while you may take the boy out of business, you can’t take business out of the boy. “Some pieces just caught our attention and have a bit of a bad attitude, maybe my rebellious attitude.”

And the man dancing on the video?

We’ll give you a hint: A woman’s name is tattooed on his arm, and the ring he flashes has a family crest.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page F1 of the New York edition with the headline: They’re Mad, They’re Bad, They Sell Accent Pieces. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe